documentarytiptip

Got to attend a small car show while the wife and I were on Sanibel Island. Saw a pretty good selection of cars, so it was a day well spent. 4K video taken using Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000

Still not sure what is causing this noise. It's a Centerforce Dual Friction clutch. New throwout bearing, new pilot bearing, resurfaced steel flywheel, new driveshaft and torque tube. Beats me. It only seems to happen when I goose the engine revs up and feather the clutch, so it seems like it makes the screeching noise when the clutch just starts to engage. Otherwise it's perfectly fine. I guess I just need to stop worrying about it and just drive the car. It will either get better, get worse, or be the same. The only time I will need to DO something is if it gets worse, otherwise I guess it's just one of those things.

Mostly about the wild deer we saw in the park while we were there. One of those deer seemed really fascinated by US! It was all she could do to hold herself back from walking right up to us to check us out, apparently.

Put new wastegates on the car with 14 lb springs in them and ran the boost lines directly from the compressor housings instead of from the back of the intake manifold. So I wanted to test that stuff all out. This is actually my second test. Boost on the first run was 11.6 an this run produced 11.7 psi at peak. Definitely an improvement over the 8.2 psi I was getting. And everything held together just fine.

What I did was to just put the tranny in fourth gear and ran it out from a slow rolling start. I didn't put the pedal at 100 percent until I was at 2800 rpm so it wouldn't bog on me. Interestingly enough got 105 kPa at 1751 rpm with 69 percent throttle. So boost seems to come on pretty early and ramps up rapidly. Not too bad, I suppose. I think I'm about ready to wrap up this tuning stuff pretty soon. :)

Been a long while since we've been there, and it appears to have grown considerably. I was astonished at the number of cars out there. 04-06-2013.

Finally got a break in the rain so I could do some more data logging for my tuning. After trying a bunch of different things, I've pretty much settled on how I want the tune to be. Just got to iron out the details and hopefully will be done soon.

Went to another one of the small cruise ins in Crawfordville this month. They have one on the second Saturday of each month. It's usually a pretty small crowd there, but quite a variety of cars, nonetheless. Check out that Cougar. Man talk about a SLEEPER!

I finally pulled all of the rubber lined stainless steel braided fuel lines off of my car and replaced them all with teflon (PTFE) fuel lines. Before pulling the old fuel lines out, I used a UV light to take a look at the fuel lines. On the driver's side of the car, the top line is the fuel line. The bottom two are oil lines running to the STS turbos. The passenger side fuel line runs to the fuel rail from the pump, the driver's side is coming back from the return of the fuel pressure regulator. My suggestion is to NOT use the rubber lined stuff for modern fuels. I'm thinking I was driving a potential torch down the road with that stuff. And the stink of gasoline I used to smell whenever I walked into the garage is now GONE completely. PTFE fuel line is really not hard to work with, and has nothing but benefits over that cheaper stuff.

Just more insult to injury, I guess. I thought the deck lid had a lot of water spotting on it after the shop in Georgia apparently left it outside most of the 14 months it was out there. And I knew the guy had a bunch of cats running around, but I just didn't give it much thought, as I knew the paint job had gotten messed up, but I figured most of my work would be on the hood. Honestly, I have NO idea how these scratches were made. And I'm not sure I can get them out without sanding down to the color level. I did get some of them out with the buffer and that deck lid has been sanded a bit beforehand with 2000 grit paper prior to the buffing. I just couldn't figure out why my buffing wasn't producing any gloss on the deck lid like it did on the hood and roof. Then I looked CLOSELY at it..... :( But why just the decklid and no other panels? Yeah, I've got lots of scratches elsewhere I've been dealing with, but NOTHING like this one panel.

Yeah, probably no big deal for most of the rest of the country, but this was an EVENT here. I don't think it got higher than 32 degrees the entire day, which is very unusual. Pretty much light freezing rain and sleet the entire day. Say a few snow flakes, but not many and not for very long. Basically just a real good day to stay inside.

Mike Carnahan sent me a new tune to do some data collection off of, and asked me to put it into boost a couple of times so he could look at the data. I went into boost in third gear the first time, and then from fourth gear. I also let the car engine brake so I could get some data in those cells with higher RPMs but with vacuum in the manifold.

I think I hear the waste gates in the first run, but not sure. The MAP value is showing that I'm only at 144 kPa which should be only 6.2 psi. There are supposed to be 10 lb springs in those waste gates.... This was the first time I've taken the car to 100 percent throttle.

These cabins are pretty hard to get a hold of in the state park, but we lucked into a cancellation and stayed at this cabin for two nights. Not too bad, especially for the price. Connie have been talking about renting one of these cabins for years (actually more like DECADES!), so we're glad we finally got to do that. And we plan to go back whenever we can.

Got a new tune from Mike Carnahan and took the car out for a cruise. Still a slight low speed issue, as I stalled on the way out of the driveway. That whining noise is the scavenge pump for the turbos. I used a remote microphone for the camcorder and had it laying on the floor pointing towards the front, so that's why it's so noticeable. Car ran pretty good, though! Got the throttle response back. Boost kicks in HARD as you can see when I wound it out in 2nd gear. But I was still only at 54 percent throttle and 5300 rpm, so there's a LOT more where that came from.

St. Joseph Peninsula State Park on Cape San Blas, Florida. Connie and I took a ride to the park on 05-14-2013, as it's been a while since we've been out there. The place looked a LOT prettier than I remembered it. Water was exceptionally clear and inviting looking, even keeping in mind the crap that BP dumped into the waters further west. Heck, I may even be tempted to go snorkeling in the Gulf of Mexico again sometime soon.

Unfortunately the wide angled lens on my camcorder doesn't show the actual size of those bamboo culms very well. The P. vivax has gotten VERY large and impressive.

Ilife asked me to take a video showing the problem I have been having recently with my model A6. It runs fine for just over an hour, then when it ran up on the lip of the garage door, it went bonkers and shut down. Since the problem has started, I always find in near the garage doors, except for one time when it was dead near the base of a large upright fan, that has a slope to that base. Evidently when the battery gets close to being low, this thing doesn't react well when one or both of the wheels lose their grip. I'm guessing, anyway.

Rented a cabin in the state park for two nights. It's three miles from the park entrance so the cabins are quite deep into the park and right at the wilderness boundary. Man, this is likely how ALL of coastal Florida used to look before being developed and built over.

Finally! Making some headway on the stalling problem I had. But still have some loping at idle after goosing the throttle a bit, and the idle is revving a bit too high right before going into closed loop. But at least I feel like I'm getting somewhere with it now, and it's not stalling out on me till it warms up.

Figured I would make a video of the various cold starts of the car so I could see the changes made with the tuning tweaks over time. Not all of the tuning changes were targeting cold start, but some changes were evident anyway. I wanted to get the engine to start up quicker with fewer cranks of the starter before the engine would catch. I think I've got that pretty well done, and the cold start idle seems to be pretty stable and smooth as well. Most of the info I got for playing with the tune came from posts on the EFILive forum, and JoeCar helped me with some direction on which tables to address for cold start issues.

They've been holding this car show at the Hardees in Crawfordville, FL for a while now, but this was the first time Connie and I have been there. Actually not bad. I don't think there were any two cars of the same make and model there, so was a pretty varied bunch. Some stuff I've never seen before, and seems like a nice bunch of folks.

Oh yeah, the first part of the video is the car starting up and getting there, so that is just to show how the low speed tuning is coming along... :)